Fridge bookshelf

Yes, but does YOUR office have an orange refrigerator full of Penguin Classics?
The Penguin Press

Bookshelves in the age of eReading

Over the last 20 years we have experienced a revolution in the way we store our knowledge. Yet while we can now shrink an entire personal library to an electronic device the size and weight of a single paperback, there has also been an explosion in the creativity behind the design of that most basic household item, the bookshelf. Bookshelves today are no longer just somewhere to store books. They are modern art, engineering experiments and, of course, status symbols.
Read more at the Thames & Hudson blog

Stacked teacups

Woodcurve

Rosenthal Residence

We told our architect at our very first meeting that one of the most important elements was to integrate our books into the heart and soul of our home. He came up with a brilliant solution which we had never seen before, to build the shelves right into staircases (set into the wall) from top to bottom of house. So essentially "book spines" line the spine of our home.
Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Architectural Interventions

Book tower

Ford's Theatre

Hole In The Floor

Raw-Edges Design Studio

Traliccio Invisible Bookshelf

Traliccio is a library wall in wood and metal. The shelves have been dematerialized and transformed to the point that they remain a thin bent rod that, thanks to its inclination, can accommodate books of different sizes. The shelves can be easily moved either vertically, by utilizing the teeth found on the back of the two supporting columns of wood, or horizontally so as to leave the user maximum freedom of composition. Tralaccio is enriched with some accessories that complement its use, such as a top sheet and bookends.
4P1B

Face shelving

It started from a chat my girlfriend and I were having. A year and a father-son project later, the very originally named 'Face Shelving' is finally done.
The idea is that depending what you put in or on the shelves, you create different faces and expressions. Enjoy.

Alexi McCarthy

Bathing in knowledge

This bath is made entirely out of books which Vanessa Mancini cut and fitted together over a metal frame to form a bath of books, which is suspended by four antique bath tub, lion-shaped feet. She intends to later cover it in layers of resin and has already applied proper taps and drain, so that it will be a utilizable, functional bath at all effects.
Who cares about that?

Wade Davis Writing Studio

Wade Davis has one of the most coveted jobs in America – Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. When he’s home in Washington, he escapes to put pen to paper in his Travis Price-designed study, overflowing with books, manuscripts, artifacts, and inspiration. “Travis did a studio on M Street in Georgetown for me,” Davis says, noting that in his current home, zoning prohibited a detached building. While many need light-filled rooms for inspiration, he wanted to avoid large windows opening onto a residential neighborhood and sought a cave-like atmosphere to disappear into his work. Subtle light was brought in by other means when the architect built a dome above his client’s desk (which Price describes as similar to the rotunda of the oracle’s temple at Delphi) and filled it with the books he uses the most. Davis whimsically calls the space his “Navajo kiva of knowledge.”
Washington Life

Travis Price Architects

A Bookshelf

In nearly every household they are to be found – old books not read for quite a long time. books are mostly presented in a shelf like trophies or remembrances although they probably will never be read again. This book shelf offers for these books which became precious just a new presence and aditional function in the special "shelf architecture". A quite arbitrary number of shelf boxes in different heights, cutting and turning round each, are forming this shelf. Every crate is oriented in its height and depth on a pair of books and forms an individual frame for it. Put into grooves, with an extended lid each, the books are forming small hinged storage spaces in the shelf.
Miriam Aust

Bookshelf book featured in Elle Decoration

Des bibliothèques design et surprenantes
La folle passion du journaliste anglais Alex Johnson ? Dénicher les bibliothèques excentriques de designers surinventifs. L'homme les affiche depuis 2007 sur son blog exclusivement dédié à ce meuble-rangement. Il dévoile aujourd'hui 224 bibliothèques, toutes regroupées dans un ouvrage paru aux éditions Thames&Hudson.
En exclusivité pour Elle.fr, découvrez une sélection de ces bibliothèques. De l'étagère XXS à la bibliothèque sculpturale qui recouvre toute une pièce en passant par la bibliothèque-brouette, difficile de ne pas trouver des idées pour aménager son intérieur.
224 bibliothèques design, Alex Johnson, Ed. Thames&Hudson, 25 €

Elle Decoration

Libreria Acqua Alta

Gondola as bookshelf...
Acqua Alta

Dangling library

Red metal
Chanan de Lange

Bookshelf book in The Times - 'Books are the new vinyl'

"...as with the fetishisation of vinyl by the fortysomething North London male, books and, specifically, their organisation and categorisation, have retained a sort of totemic significance. The art publisher Thames & Hudson is about to bring out two books (not available on Kindle) on the subject of book classification and arrangement: the paperback edition of Living With Books by Dominique Dupuich and Roland Beaufre (out at the beginning of April) and Bookshelf by Alex Johnson (February 20). Both are visual explorations of how we curate our own domestic Dewey systems.
Books are the new vinyl: take it as read

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

2012 Oscar-Nominated Animated Short. Inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books, “Morris Lessmore” is a poignant, humorous allegory about the curative powers of story. Using a variety of techniques, including miniatures, computer animation, and 2D animation, award‐winning author and illustrator William Joyce and co‐director Brandon Oldenburg present a hybrid style of animation that harkens back to silent films and MGM
Technicolor musicals.
Moonbot

book shelf

These shelves use the wall to redistribute the weight, allowing a wide span with minimal hardware.
Jason Neufeld

Bookshelf book reviewed in Marie Claire

"Does World Book Day (March 1) mean very much as we recline with our Kindles? Possibly not, but Bookshelf by Alex Johnson (£14.95, Thames & Hudson) - the first ever book on bookshelf design - should see a resurgence in paperback appreciation. What's not to love about a sofa made out of books? Or a lamp? Or a dress?! Alex Johnson's Bookshelf is full of novel ideas."

Marie Claire, p190, Pageturners

The Hundred Story House

The Hundred Story House is a piece of interactive public art. It is a miniature Brooklyn brownstone whose windows open upon shelves of books (about 100 of them) which can be borrowed by the community. Situated in the Cobble Hill Park on Clinton Street, the House is a tiny lending library open to all and operating on the honor system -- take-a-book, leave-a-book. This is an effort to celebrate the BOOK as a physical object, and the pleasure of holding one in your hand. Or better yet, placing one in someone else’s.
Kickstarter

Book-harp

The strings of the book-harp are a play of light and statics, three-dimensional picture and bookend, transparent and complete simultaneously. Depending on the angle of the literary instrument it seems once closed, sometimes translucent – and turns to life upon passing. It captures the passer-by at the corner of his eye and draws attention to itself, the variegated content, or out into the sky.
Constructed with colour coated MDF
Hanspeter Steiger